After 6
months of efforts in Hawaii the University of Hawaii finally dropped 3
patents on the Hawaiian taro, or Kalo, staple food and culturally
sacred plant in Hawaii.

This was a huge step forward in the efforts to protect Hawaiian flora,
fauna, land, and people from genetic modification and the patenting of
life.

Walter Ritte from Molokai spearheaded this and we offer our deep
gratitude and congratulations to Walter and the warriors in Molokai:
all of their island-hopping, letters in the newspapers, risking of
themselves by chaining doors, holding protests and directly confronting
the University paid off. They truly set an example for indigenous
peoples and those concerned with bioprospecting all over the world.

Chris Kobayashi, taro farmer from Hanalei, was an incredible presence
in this efforts and served to put a face to the many farmers she
represented.

Countless others help as well: Bill Freese and The Center for Food
Safety, Mililani Trask and Hawaii SEED, not to mention the Center for
Hawaiian studies at UH and many others. Thank you all for your
continued support and efforts in this.

Media coverage was awesome. Here are just a few of the stories:

This article
was on the front page of the Honolulu Advertiser 6/20/06:

These important points were made in several of the news releases. Note
that UH official Ostrander actually admitted that UH has been leaving
out Hawaiians and the public voice for 20-30 years! THIS isn't
something we've heard too much of.

"The real test would be to see if the university administration,
researchers and faculty would have been able to give up a patent that
was going to make millions of dollars in the name of Hawaiian
spirituality," said Manu Kaiama, director of the Native Hawaiian
Leadership project.

"We're trying to reverse what I think has been a trend over the last
20-30 years, to move in a different direction," Ostrander said. "And
the chancellor and the vice president here are optimistic that we've
made a start."

This battle over taro is just the beginning. Hawaiian advocates plan on
fighting for a list of issues related to UH. (Quoted
from Star Bulletin)

What can you do?
Well, writing letters with your opinions about this to the newspapers
would be great to keep the media going.

Here are two articles that you could send some corrections or comments
to:
This "opinion" piece in the Honolulu Advertiser asks if it was the best
thing or not to drop the patents.

If you could write a response to the Advertser it would be great: Click
here.

Then there is this one that talks about disease being a big threat to
taro. We all know a bigger threat is diversion of water (due to
development), high land taxes and a lack of farmers. One of the cards
UH has been using is that taro farmers really need the GMO taro,
although most of the farmers have been resistant. This is a good
opportunity to talk about the bigger agricultural and cultural issues
that really surround the lack of poi and kalo in Hawaii and the fact
that most farmers don't want their culture and markets threatened with
GE taro. Here's a link.

by
Sara Sullivan for Hawaii SEED
Next, we will stop all genetic modification on taro. Though UH agreed
to stop GE on the Hawaiian varieties, they still continue to manipulate
the Chinese Bunlong variety of taro which could lead to economic
devastation of the taro market and massive contamination, not to
mention all of our other concerns.

Please keep your eyes peeled for more news around this issue, and pass
this great victory on to anyone who may be interested.

As Senator Clayton Hee said yesterday, not only does this send
precedent for all native peoples in the Pacific, but it truly sets an
example for indigenous people world wide.

The University of Hawai‘i at Manoa announced today that it would assign
three patents related to development of disease resistant taros to the
greater Native Hawaiian community.

The patents in question arose from work conducted by a UH faculty
member in the 1990s, at the request of Samoan taro growers, to address
the near eradication of their taro crops to a leaf blight. The
researcher developed a number of cultivars from crosses of Hawaiian and
Palauan taro strains. The latter were obtained specifically for this
purpose with the consent (including proper permitting) of Palauan taro
growers and Palauan government officials.

Using traditional breeding techniques, the UH researcher produced three
strains that were shown to have increased disease resistance. The
patents were granted in 2002.

“The University of Hawai‘i has a strong desire to maintain appropriate
respect and sensitivity to the indigenous Hawaiian host culture,” said
UH Manoa Vice Chancellor for Research Gary K. Ostrander. “Taro is
unique to the Hawaiian people in that it represents the embodiment of
their sacred ancestor. As such, it is appropriate to make an exception
to our standard policy of holding all patents.”

Discussions are under way within the Hawaiian community on the
appropriate entity to receive the patents.

Gary Ostrander
Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate EducationUniversity
of Hawaii at Manoaphone:(808) 956-7837email: gko@hawaii.edu

Hawaiian activists locked the front and back entrances to the
University of Hawaii's medical school on Thursday in protest to the
school's patents on taro.
The UH Board of Regents was set to meet at the building about other
topics.

The University's College of Tropical Agriculture was granted patents
for taro in 2002. Hawaiian groups said the university did not invent
taro and therefore has no right to own or license it.

Activist Walter Ritte led the group. Taro is owned collectively by
Hawaiians and therefore UH should return the three varieties to the
public domain, according to Ritte.

"We are saying you cannot own our taro. You cannot own our taro. It's
so simple," Ritte said.

University researchers created the new taro and UH said under its
contracts with professors it needs to protect their intellectual
property. The new taro is not genetically modified, but created by
traditional cross-breeding, officials said.

UH officials said the new taro is given to farmers for free but under
the licensing agreement if a farmer makes a profit on the taro, the
university gets to keep 2 percent.

The group unlocked the chains to the entrances at 9:30am. after regents
agreed to meet with the group at a later time to discuss the taro issue.

The protest did not affect classes. Students and faculty were able to
enter through other locations.

This is
a report from a second press conference held by GMO Free Hawai`i at the
Taro patch at UH Manoa, today. January 13, 2006. Speakers were native
Hawaiian advocate, Walter Ritte of Molokai and Bill Freese from the
Center for Food Safety (and Friends of the Earth).The university owns
the rights to three varieties of the traditional staple taro. - Jeri Di
Petro

Arguing
that the patents were wrongly obtained, local and national activists
opposing the patenting of taro plants are asking the University of
Hawaii to relinquish the rights it owns for three varieties of the
traditional Hawaiian food staple.

Walter Ritte, a Molokai-based activist, plans to join Kauai taro farmer
Chris Kobayashi and representatives of the Center for Food Safety in
Washington, D.C., for a news conference at UH to air their grievances
concerning the university's patenting of the three taro varieties,
which are called Palehua, Paakala and Pauakea.

Issued in 2002, the patents protect the university's ownership rights
of the varieties, which were developed by scientists at the College of
Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources. The patent requires farmers
wanting to grow the varieties to pay a licensing fee to the university,
prohibits farmers from selling the seeds and requires farmers growing
the plants to let UH officials onto the farmers' property to study the
plants.

But the critics contend that the university should not exercise
intellectual property rights on plants that are derived from species
that Polynesians brought to Hawaii more than 1,000 years ago. In
traditional Hawaiian culture, the taro plant is viewed as a spiritual
ancestor, a crop that sustained the people who cultivated and cared for
it. Given this context, Ritte said, any kind of genetic alteration,
experimentation or patenting of Hawaiian taro is offensive.

"The taro is not a commodity; the taro is our very person," Ritte said.
"It's almost like they're buying and selling us."

But these cultural issues are not the crux of the argument made by
Ritte and Kobayashi. Instead, the opponents argue the patents should
not have been issued under U.S. patent law.

For example, the opponents assert in a statement that the UH patents
should be invalid because the plants are not much different from
varieties already invented by Hawaiians. Such previous inventions are
called prior art in legal parlance, and the existence of prior art
similar to the invention can make it impossible for an inventor to
obtain a patent.

Of particular importance to the argument is a variety called Maui
Lehua, which was used to cultivate UH's patented hybrid taro plants.

"The qualities of the patented varieties derive to a considerable
extent from Maui Lehua, whose properties are the result of many
centuries of breeding efforts by native Hawaiians," the opponents
contend. "Thus, the patent claims for the three patented varieties are
invalidated by considerations of prior art."

The statement also claims that the UH scientists failed to validate
properties they claimed the taro contained, another essential element
to obtaining a patent.
Finally, the statement takes issue with the several aspects of the
licensing agreement, including royalties that farmers selling the taro
would have to pay to UH.

"The collection of royalties from farmers whose taxes already support
the university's operations, including taro breeding activities, is
abhorrent," the statement said. "It represents a superfluous and unjust
levy on Hawaiian taro farmers."

Although the patents have existed for years, they came to the attention
of the activists only recently, said Bill Freese, a scientific
consultant for the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Food Safety, which
opposes the genetic alteration of food crops.

"It's a sign of how these things often take place without public
awareness, and I think that once people know that with a plant like the
sacred taro plant -- that the University of Hawaii is claiming to own
these varieties -- I don't think people will be happy about it," Freese
said.

Andy Hashimoto, dean of the College of Tropical Agriculture and Human
Resources, was not available for comment yesterday. Anya Wieczorek, a
biotechnology specialist for CTAHR, said that under university
policies, the patents belonged to the scientists and the university's
Office of Technology Transfer and Economic Development, and that the
college would not have the power to relinquish them. Officials of the
technology transfer office were not available for comment.

Last year, Wieczorek said, the university said it would not conduct
genetic engineering research on Hawaiian taro until it could set up a
process for obtaining guidance from a native Hawaiian advisory
committee. No university scientist has expressed a desire to conduct
such work, she said, so there has been no need to establish the
advisory group.

GMO tomato graphics provided by GreenPeace Denmark

This
article is a result of our GMO Free Hawai`i press conference that was
held outside the Pacific Rim Biotech Conference at the Hilton Hawaiian
Village in Honolulu on January 12, 2006. - Jeri Di Petro

LAIE, Hawaii - Genetic engineering saved Ken Kamiya's papaya farm on
Oahu's north shore, and it may yet rescue the orchid from the grips of
a nasty flower-killing virus.
But in Kona, Una Greenaway lives in dread that biotechnology will ruin
her organic coffee plantation. Pineapple industry officials have made
it clear they want nothing to do with genetic engineering.

So it goes in the Aloha State, where genetic engineering has riven a
state just now awakening to the fact that balmy and remote Hawaii has -
for better and worse - long served as the world's largest outdoor
biotechnology lab.

Since scientists first planted the spectacular commercial flop that was
the Flavr Savr tomato on a small plot here in 1988, federal regulators
have approved more than 10,600 applications to grow experimental
biotech crops on 49,300 separate fields throughout the United States.
More of these are in Hawaii than any other state.

Through the powers of biotechnology, low-nicotine tobacco,
disease-resistant cotton and soy immune to weed killer are grown here.
Hawaii's genetically engineered corn projects outnumber even those
grown in Iowa and Illinois.

Whatever the reason, farmers such as Kamiya are satisfied with genetic
engineering's effects on Hawaii.

Kamiya has grown papayas, Hawaii's best selling fruit behind pineapple,
since he got back from serving in the Vietnam War in 1969. He lived
through three crop-killing epidemics and the vagaries of farming, but
by the early 1990s his farm, along with the entire Hawaiian papaya
industry, was finally on the brink of destruction. They were at the
mercy of a cureless virus.

Scientist Dennis Gonsalves, a native Hawaiian then at Cornell
University, developed the clever idea to genetically splice a harmless
piece of the virus into papaya trees - essentially vaccinating them in
much the same way people fight the flu.

The gambit worked, and today, the virus is a mere nuisance for the $16
million industry - even for the 50 percent of papayas grown
conventionally and without virus protection in Hawaii. That's because
the virus has fewer places to roost now.

"Gonsalves saved our butts," Kamiya said as he wandered among the
mini-palm trees bearing ripe yellow fruit on the 15-acre farm he leases
from Brigham Young University, which maintains a campus in Laie some 40
miles north of Honolulu.

The day before, Kamiya spent five hours in Honolulu at a meeting
helping to defeat a proposed measure from qualifying for the ballot
that would have banned genetic engineering on Oahu island and
effectively put him out of business.

But that's precisely what Hawaiian organic coffee growers like
Greenaway and others want. They're shocked Hawaii has become
biotechnology's chief laboratory and are concerned about their economic
future.

Greenaway worries that the creeping march of biotechnology in Hawaii
will soon spell her financial ruin if consumers fear famed Kona coffee
was somehow tainted by biotechnology.

Researchers in the state are attempting to genetically engineer coffee
plants to grow decaffeinated beans, which don't occur naturally. The
researchers haven't yet grown their experimental coffee plants
outdoors, even though federal regulators gave permission in 1999.

Still, Greenaway is haunted by the prospect that the work will move
outdoors, then mix with her crop and dilute her coffee's punch. She
worries no caffeine junkie paying $20 a pound for Kona coffee wants
that.

"Genetic engineered coffee would be an economic disaster in Kona,"
Greenaway said.
In many ways, the biotechnology debate in Hawaii is a microcosm of the
global debate over biotechnology.

There hasn't been a single allergic reaction or other health problem
credibly connected to consuming biotech food. Still, many scientists do
worry about the threats biotechnology poses to the environment, mainly
through inadvertent cross-pollination with conventionally grown crops.
That poses a particular problem for organic farmers who charge a
premium to guarantee customers their groceries are free of genetic
engineering.

The industry and its supporters proudly point out that biotechnology is
actually helping small farmers by reducing pesticide use. Close to 8
million subsistence farmers throughout the developing world are growing
genetically engineered soy and corn that require less toxic weed killer
and bug spray, making farming better for the environment and for those
toiling in the fields.

Yet, growing numbers of consumers and activists fret that the major
biotechnology companies - specifically the titan Monsanto Inc. of St.
Louis - are asserting a Microsoft-like grip on the world's food supply
that will ultimately kill organic and family farms.

In Hawaii alone, several anti-biotech measures have been introduced
recently in the Legislature mimicking laws in four California counties
banning biotech, though none have passed here so far. A federal lawsuit
filed last year effectively halted all experiments in Hawaii that
involve splicing human genes into plants to produce medicine.

That kind of skittishness resonates with large food producers, which in
the past have succumbed to consumers' skepticism about biotech food.

In 2000, McDonald's Corp. successfully cowed potato farmers to reject
genetically engineered potatoes. Two years ago, bread makers forced
Monsanto to abandon its plans to market genetically engineered wheat.
And recently, pineapple industry representatives wrote the University
of Hawaii that the industry doesn't want or need biotechnology.

But Steve Ferreira, a University of Hawaii researcher working on
genetically engineered papaya, thinks those growers' sentiments would
change if they were facing the decimation of their crops.

"Their need is not as urgent as it was with the papaya farmers,"
Ferreira said.